Even Blaffer Gallery got in the act with early-1980s photos of actress-singer Pia Zadora and rocker Billy Squier in Celebutants, Groupies, and Friends: A Photographic Legacy From the Andy Warhol Foundation, my favorite of the three shows.

When half the city didn't have power post-Ike, the museums' celeb fever served as a makeshift alternative to cable, but I was glad to see it subside. So I was less than thrilled to hear that the centerpiece of Iconic Heroes, a group show of photographic work by a dream team of blue-chip artists at Barbara Davis Gallery, was a Chuck Close portrait of Kate Moss.

That changed the moment I walked into the gallery. While seeing the perfectly capable portraiture of Taylor-Wood and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders — photographer of The Black List Project — didn't feel much more special than flipping through it in a magazine, there is no substitute for experiencing Close's Kate (2006) in person.

While Greenfield-Sanders sometimes seems to coast on his subjects' iconic status — sure, Toni Morrison looks commanding and majestic, but I've never seen a photo in which she didn't — Close goes above and beyond the challenge of making us see Moss as we've never seen her, without resorting to gimmicks, as Taylor-Wood did by asking her actors to cry for the camera.

He does so by bringing something both old and new to portraiture. Moss is shot straight-on, head-and-shoulders against a black background in a 19th-century daguerrotype image.

But instead of printing the image on paper, Close translates it using digital weaving techniques to create a 103-by-79-inch jacquard tapestry made up of 17,800 threads.

The combination of scale and texture, along with the image's mix of crisply detailed and blurry areas, gives Kate a palpability that stops you in your tracks. Once you've caught your breath and moved closer, you get lost in the subtleties of woven light and shadow.

Stand back again, and your attention returns to Moss, whom Close has apparently shot without makeup, zits and all. She's haunting and radiant. If you've never understood fashion photographers' obsession with her, you do now.

The tapestry floats like a classic Mark Rothko painting, but it's grown out of Close's decades of transposing photographic portraits to paintings, using grids to take images apart and then reconstruct them.

The fact that this time the reconstruction happened by digital methods rather than by hand doesn't leave the viewer cold — just the opposite. Close's tapestry portrait of Moss, along with those of artists Kiki Smith and Lyle Ashton, which flank Kate, feel at least as intimate as anything he's done on canvas. This is what a deep engagement with portraiture looks like.

Longo's 1980s photographs of suit-clad men on New York rooftops served as the basis for his classic Men in the Cities series of life-size drawings. One isn't quite sure whether they're ecstatic or tortured, dancing or possessed by demons, perhaps because Longo reportedly pelted his subjects with tennis balls and rocks or pulled on ropes attached to their legs.